A handful of indies bow or expand this weekend as Oscar hopefuls from Poor Things to The Holdovers and American Fiction crowd theaters after nominations earlier this week. Anatomy Of A Fall is getting a big bump. Oppenheimer is back on Imax.
13.01.2024 - 18:25 / nme.com
Poor Things looks set to be one of the major films of the 2024 award season.Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos (The Favourite, The Lobster), the sci-fi black comedy follows young woman Bella Baxter (Emma Stone) who, after dying by suicide, is resurrected by a scientist and runs off with a debauched lawyer on a journey of self-discovery.The film is based on a novel of the same name by Alasdair Gray. Alongside Stone, the cast includes Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe, Ramy Youssef, Christopher Abbott, Kathryn Hunter, Jerrod Carmichael, Hanna Schygulla and Margaret Qualley.At the wedding ceremony between Bella Baxter and Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef), Alfie Blessington (Christopher Abbott), the ex-husband of Bella’s mother, interrupts and implores Bella, who he believes is her mother Victoria Blessington, to return with him.Bella abandons Max at the altar, keen to learn of her mother’s past life with Alfie.
At his mansion, however, Bella soon discovers the nature of their relationship – with her mother having killed herself to escape his abuse. Alfie threatens Bella at gunpoint if she doesn’t submit to undergoing genital mutilation, and demands she drink a chloroform-laced drink.
Bella throws the drink in his face, which causes Alfie to shoot himself in the foot and pass out.Bella returns to Godwin Baxter’s (Willem Dafoe) home with passed out Alfie, where she performs the same surgery on him that Godwin performed on her – swapping his brain with that of a goat. We later see Godwin die peacefully with Bella and Max at her side, who then decide to continue his legacy by studying surgery and taking over the ward.In a four-star review of Poor Things, NME wrote: “While its oddball nature won’t be to all tastes, the championing of female
.A handful of indies bow or expand this weekend as Oscar hopefuls from Poor Things to The Holdovers and American Fiction crowd theaters after nominations earlier this week. Anatomy Of A Fall is getting a big bump. Oppenheimer is back on Imax.
The sister of renowned Scottish author Alasdair Gray has insisted that he wouldn't be furious that every trace of Scotland was wiped from the Hollywood movie based on his book.
Jordan Moreau The countdown to the 2024 Oscars has officially started. All of the nominations for the 96th annual Academy Awards were announced Tuesday morning.
Poor Things.The film—which has already earned Stone a best actress statue at the , where the film also won best musical or comedy motion picture—sees Stone's character Bella Baxter brought back from the dead by a scientist who replaces her brain with the brain of a baby. Based on the 1992 Alasdair Gray novel of the same name and directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, the film follows Bella's “fantastical evolution” as she embarks on a journey of discovery.The film is raucous and unflinchingly candid, but has drawn criticism for its graphic sex and masturbation scenes, which show Bella learning her body and its power.Stone defended the scenes in an interview with BBC Radio 4, in which host Samira Ahmed described them as “quite graphic,” adding: “I think it’s fair to say [these sorts of scenes are] unusual these days in Hollywood.”Stone replied, “So much of this was about being true to Bella's experience.
Tatiana Maslany, star of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, doesn’t think a second season of the Marvel series is going to happen.
Perfect magazine in a recent interview. “I’ve never done anything like [‘Poor Things’] before.” “So, like, the sex scenes,” continued Ruffalo. “Am I too old to be doing that kind of stuff? Does anyone want to see that?”In a second Instagram post, the “Spotlight” actor, who appeared nude from the waist up in the cover shoot, mused that Hollywood is currently “in this prudish time for films.” “Sexuality is so deeply connected to the psychology of a character.
Naman Ramachandran Warner Bros.’ “Wonka” continued its reign over the U.K. and Ireland box office with £2.2 million ($2.8 million), according to numbers from Comscore. After six weekends at the box office, the Timothée Chalamet starrer has a sweet total of £56.1 million.
Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic In “Poor Things,” Willem Dafoe plays God, bringing his devilish grin to the role of an ethically unbound surgeon who grafts body parts from one creature onto another, blending ducks and geese with dogs and goats — and, in the case of Emma Stone’s Bella Baxter, implanting a spare brain in the corpse of a drowned woman. The Dr. Frankenstein-like character is just the latest leap of faith for an actor who spoke to Variety, apropos of receiving a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Emma Stone has landed another major awards season win!
Mark Ruffalo, Emma Stone and Ramy Youssef are celebrating!
Mark Ruffalo tells me he has, until now, kinda shied away from playing the villain of the piece. He licks his lips as he declares that it’s “so much fun to finally get to play the bad guy.”
Jon Burlingame Sometimes directors don’t want you humming the music as you leave their film. More than ever, filmmakers are seeking fresh musical approaches, especially when the subject matter is dark or fantastic. Three late-2023 releases demonstrate this with music that catches the ear in unusual ways.
Clayton Davis Senior Awards Editor Emma Stone has a dream, and not one you’d expect. The “Poor Things” star, coming off a Golden Globe win this week, tells Variety‘s Awards Circuit Podcast that she wants to be a contestant on the classic game show “Jeopardy” — and no, not the “Celebrity” edition. “I apply every June,” she says.
It was only a matter of time before Willem Dafoe worked with Yorgos Lanthimos, and the result is everything you might expect and more. In Poor Things, the actor plays Dr. Godwin Baxter, a Scottish scientist given to sewing dog’s heads onto chickens, and we meet him after completing the most important experiment of his life: by transplanting an infant’s brain into the skull of its dead mother, he creates the anarchic and wholly unpredictable Bella (Emma Stone). It may sound creepy, most likely because it really is, but Dafoe brings a surprising sadness to the role. Here, he reflects on the film’s strange, unique world, raises the curtain on 2024, and talks a little about his recent festival hit Inside, in which he plays a clueless thief who becomes trapped in the apartment of a wealthy art collector.
Selome Hailu You might be able to spot Ramy Youssef for a minute in Gus Van Sant’s 2018 film “Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot.” Maybe. “I think I’m in it? I don’t remember if I saw it,” laughs Youssef, who is credited for the role of Drinker. “There were so many times where I booked roles where the character has a name like Drinker or Guy in Kitchen, and then I would, like, not be invited to do anything.
Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series spotlighting the year’s most talked-about scripts continues with Yorgos Lanthimos‘ Poor Things, the darkly comedic genre-bender penned by Tony McNamara that marks a reunion of the Greek filmmaker with McNamara and star Emma Stone after 2018’s Oscar-nominated The Favourite.
Emma Stone’s new film Poor Things includes a sex scene that had to be edited in order to fit in with UK law.The film, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos (The Favourite, The Lobster), includes a scene so contentious that if left uncut would have contravened the UK’s Protection of Children Act 1978.The darkly comedic fantasy film sees Stone’s character being brought back to life by Willem Dafoe, who plays a Frankenstein-like scientist in the film.In the scene in question, two young boys watch Stone’s Bella Baxter working as a prostitute, after their father has hired Bella to teach them how to have sex.The British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), which is responsible for the classification and censorship of all films and video works exhibited in UK cinemas or released on physical media, is clear that the film could not have been shown, even with an 18 certificate, unless the scene had been modified.“We originally saw this film for advice. We informed the distributor we would be likely to classify the film 18 on condition that changes be made to one short sequence depicting sexual activity in the presence of children,” said a BBFC statement.“This is in accordance with the Protection of Children Act 1978.
As film fans around the world slowly begin to calm down from the hype of this year’s Golden Globes, many casual viewers have been left intrigued by one of this year’s winners, Poor Things. The sci-fi film, which stars Emma Stone won big at this year’s Golden Globe ceremony, when it took home the award for Best Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy, as well as bagging Emma an award for Best Actress herself.
Jennifer Lawrence totally wins for one of the greatest moments at the 2024 Golden Globe Awards, even though she didn’t actually win.
“It’s a very different film,” Yorgos Lanthimos said Sunday about his next movie with Emma Stone, titled Kinds of Kindness,which he’s currently editing. It marks the third time the pair have worked together.